With decades of work behind us toward an America that offers equal opportunity to any person no matter their color, you'd think we could say that the U.S. is officially beyond the influence of racism.
It's not. It won't ever be beyond the influence of racism, either, with politicking such as that involved in the creation of Affirmative Action — a well-intentioned, but viciously cyclical approach to ensuring minorities are given the same work and education opportunities as the majority.
The Tuesday Supreme Court decision to strike down a major part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 proves we're not ready to say racism is dead. Unfortunately, one of the arguments used to support the 5-to-4 decision was just that: Apparently, we don't need these laws when we aren't dealing with a nation divided by color anymore.
How could we say that we're not divided in many ways still? If you look at any recent race or hate crime-related news, it's clear that there are still issues of racism that need to be addressed. Yes, they may not be the exact same issues that minorities were facing during the Civil Rights movement; however, that does not mean we don't have more work to do to ensure that our nation continues to make progress in equality.
Simply citing that we finally have an African-American president does nothing to prove the U.S. is beyond the fight for racial equality. As a matter of fact, racial equality has taken on an entirely different form that can be found in border issues between the U.S. and Mexico as well as the controversial immigration policy (or lack thereof) that police's our border.
Whether it's Paula Deen's use of a term derogatory toward African-Americans or Arizona's controversial Senate Bill 1070 that was accused of using racial profiling, racism is still prominent in today's world. We may not see it in voting booths, but that certainly does not mean we need to do away with any legislation that fixed those issues before. Updating archaic law is an entirely different story; racism is something that cannot simply be legislated into oblivion. It takes consistency to battle a persistent problem.
It's fair to say that our society is grappling with the ever-changing definition of racism. Now that we've moved beyond segregated bathrooms and water fountains (an obvious sign of racism,) we've taken to searching for it, as with the case of Trayvon Martin and the implementation of Affirmative Action.
We're still facing the stigmas that held American and immigrant minorities hostage during the days of slavery and the more recent days of the Civil Rights movement, not to mention our slew of historical indiscretions toward basically every other race, whether Native American, Asian or Arabic.
Perhaps burning bridges we spent more than a century building isn't the best method to ensure our nation is truly a place of equal opportunity.
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